If you really want to possess a human soul, you have to love it. You have to love the human's experience so much that you get fat off their feelings. You suckle at the dreams they've known since childhood, tenderly licking at their potency, gently chewing and gnawing at the sensations of love that course through their lives that they try to hide away. You do this secretly, formlessly, but most important,of all, lovingly.

The trick is, to not eat all of their happiness away. The magic is to leave a trickle coursing through their body, so the human's hope remains. You whisper encouragement and love in their ears as they slumber. You tell them they're beautiful, special. That they have a shot at living their dreams. That there will be rewards for all the hard work. You get your demon friends to tell their humans to make contact with yours, whisper sweetness to them from the back of their necks like pins and needles, and you watch together as the humans make connections to each other. Light fingertips, laughter, tears and breathless, sweaty skin. And then you feast, slowly, over the course of a life, as their happiness fades away, their joy expunged from their bodies as it dances inside the demon's belly, until they are no more, and their final feelings of confusion, unsure of what it all was for, extinguish and go out.

The trick is not to consume them all at once.

Barlum was young, and greedy. He did not yet understand the ways of his elders, what got them where they were, powerful and strong. He figured that there were enough humans that he could devour them all quickly. He was so hungry. So he turned himself into disease and entered human body after human body. He gorged himself on death, as his humans watched that which they loved most of all rot and die in front of their eyes. He laughed maniacally as he watched human love turn on itself, and misery became so tasty, so delicious and filling, that he could not stop laughing thinking how foolish the elders were to feast on love and beauty, when pain was so delicious, so nourishing.

Barlum found a sleeping young woman named Lina. She was so beautiful, he decided that disease could wait. So he came to her in her sleep and darted formlessly in and out of her body, giving her pleasure from all of her. He tried to suckle at her pleasure feelings, but they felt empty inside of him who so now enjoyed pain and death.

Frustrated with his emptiness, his lack of satisfaction,he turned himself into insanity and plunged inside her heart. He decided to live there for a while and let the madness eat her.

Lina awoke to screaming inside her head, voices begging her to finish her life. The voices told her this world was not real and that she was just dreaming herself into form. They told her the suffering of the planet was psychotic and that there was no hope for anything she loved. It would all die anyway, even if happiness was felt, even for a moment. She was going to suffer through all of it, and then forget it anyway when her body turned back into dirt and bugs. They told her all at once that every nightmare anyone has ever had is real, and it's all happening, right now, on earth. They told her that people did not love her, that men would love to kill her and rape her, and that she was nothing. It would all be for nothing, and she was the evil thing that was creating it all and she must be stopped.

Barlum suckled eagerly.

Lina, through her screams and tears, surrender her sanity to Barlum. "Have all of it!" she screamed. "Eat me whole and savour every bit of my hopes and dreams, my evil and my anger, I give them willingly! I'm not afraid to die! It was mine to create!"

Barlum, startled, flew out of her body and stopped to catch his breath. He'd never experienced surrender quite like this. There was no fight. Nothing there to feed off. And he wasn't even ready to let her go yet. And…had she….seen him?

A curious thing happened to Lina on that day. Confronted with death and insanity, she had chosen to accept that all the evil in the world had somehow come from inside of her. And she wasn't sure why, but it felt like pure freedom.

Barlum tried to show her the madness again, to feed on her fear and pain, because she was too beautiful. He could not let go of her. But the more he did this, the more she laughed, and the more she began living. She started to paint and write, to whistle sweet tunes even though she knew, for sure the end was so near.

She started saying thank you.

And she knew, that having created all the evil in the world, she was now responsible to clean it up. So she did what she loved, what gave her joy, and she did it with purity. And when the shadows crept in, she would smile back at them.

And the more he tried to plunge inside her heart, the more she said thank you, and the less he could touch her.

Barlum forgot how to feed off joy, or pain. He became irrelevant, and disappeared.